Ejaculation Frequency and Risk of Prostate Cancer

I recently came across this research: Ejaculation Frequency and Risk of Prostate Cancer: Updated Results with an Additional Decade of Follow-up. It has been alluded to a few times here and recently there's an interesting discussion lead by @learning in his thread Managing PMO instead of abstaining. He says

And @Immature responds with a page on Your Brain on Porn which looks at an article surveying studies:

One problem is that the survey paper on YBOP pre-dates the follow-on study I found:

• Evidence for Masturbation and Prostate Cancer Risk: Do We Have a Verdict?, July 2016 (here)
• Ejaculation Frequency and Risk of Prostate Cancer: Updated Results with an Additional Decade of Follow-up, December 2016 (here)

The National Health Service (NHS) in the UK sums up the findings thus:

(From here)

I am not a medical doctor so lots of the research went over my head but the full paper is well written and is available online for free here (or the PDF here).

These are the author's conclusions:

I plucked up the courage today to mention this to my doctor (GP, general practitioner, not a urologist). He was not familiar with the research but felt if it did show causation then it was worth acting on, his phrase was "go for it". The paper does not show causation but the authors do have an interesting section on proposed mechanisms that may explain the association:

Giving up masturbation has proved a valuable tool for getting me through to 489 days porn free, but I think it may be time to go back to masturbation and just focus on staying porn free. I am morally and emotionally against porn but giving up masturbation was only ever a tool for me. If it is a tool that might risk my long term health then I'll stop using it. I'll probably wait until I hit 500 days, that seems a good number. Oddly my counter will increase as I gave up porn six days before adding masturbation abstinence to the mix!

 

But is that proven for prostate cancer?

I agree though. A good diet, not overweight, lots of exercise, are all important to being generally healthy. I do all of them.

 

Thanks @tiredofbeingtired. One thing I liked about the study I posted was that you could read it, see the stats, read the researchers' own caveats and concerns. The page you post name-checks researchers but doesn’t give proper citations, you cannot dig into the medical journal papers. Do you have any with that kind of rigour in?

 

This one ... https://twitter.com/YourBrainOnPorn/status/1001180266260398080

He links to this brief synopsis of the Aboul-Enein, Bernstein, and Ross paper "Evidence for Masturbation and Prostate Cancer Risk: Do We Have a Verdict?" from July 2016 (in Volume 4, Issue 3, of Sexual Medicine Review). That's one of the papers I mention above. The trouble is that although the synopsis was written in March 2017 the paper is from July 2016, i.e. before the publication of the paper I mentioned, so the findings are not part of their survey. Even so the synopsis Wilson references does say things like this:

I think we should be very cautious about saying the link between masturbation and reducing prostate cancer is a myth. To me it looks like there is evidence but nothing conclusive.

(N.B. On a more personal note I am not ready to go back to masturbation yet since avoiding it feels fundamental to my success giving up porn. So for now I'll take the slight risk. Perhaps one day; it's certainly something to keep revisiting especially if more evidence comes to light.)

 

That's not how sex works in our relationship, it's not a medical fix, it's something we both need to be in the mood for.

 

I did get that, it's just that this subject (the link between masturbation and prostate health) seems such a potentially problematic one for NoFap that I want to keep this thread ... I don't know the right word ... 'informative'

Do keep your eyes peeled for new research, it'd be good to get to the truth of all this.

 

On another thread ...

The studies I quoted counted frequent ejaculation as greater than or equal to 21 times a month, not 152 times, so they would not need internet porn.

Immunity would be great but I do not think that's what we are discussing.

Indeed - I think the jury is still out on this one. It just annoys me when people here claim that all is fine and that any studies to the contrary are bullshit. We do not know, the studies are contradictory.

Agreed. But there are lots of men here who have given up masturbation (myself included) and it is wise to be aware that such abstinence may increase our risk of prostate cancer.

Agreed, but to most people they are the same thing: if you want to avoid something then reducing its chances is a good idea.

 

How long are you planning to reboot for? The studies posted cover years (decades) so I doubt that the 90 or the 180 day reboot will make any difference. But if (like me) you are planning to give up masturbation long term then it is worth reading up on the potential implications, though as @Phantompoint points out the studies do not all agree.